Essays

3 Must-Reads for this Weekend #13

Welcome to Fall, 2012! Hope you are getting your pumpkins, and your fall gear out this weekend. There’s a definite crispness in the air here in California. These stories caught my eye this week; All address the tension of scale and meaning, much like #SocialEra.

75% of the S&P500 in 2020 won’t be ones we know of today.

“The average lifespan of a company listed in the S&P 500 has shrunk by more than 50 years in the last century, from 67 years in the 1920s to 15 years today, according to Yale Professor Richard Foster. Today’s rate of change “is at a faster pace than ever,” he says. Foster predicts that by 2020, more than three-fourths of the S&P 500 will be companies we don’t know about today.”

The reality is that there’s a new set of rules in town, and they’re scarily simple. They’re also scarily powerful once you get them. However, getting them right is the hard part. If you can claim the management of your company truly lives by the mantra that “done” is better than “perfect,” and that the organization’s survival is about moving fast and breaking things, then you need to ask them if they’re prepared to cut out advertising. It’s more than likely their answer would still be, “No.” He says that, in boardrooms, “I can’t help but notice that courage seems to be a limited currency.”

Oy.

More here: http://www.fastcompany.com/3001533/truth-about-being-done-versus-being-perfect

In “How to Scale Without Losing Soul”, the writers at Wired take on the question of what’s next for Etsy.

“But in a much more substantive move, Etsy is also building a wholesale marketplace from a platform called Trunkt (which it bought from indie developer Dev Tandon) that will give sellers tools to get their products “into the world in brick-and-mortar stores, catalogs, and other online stores,” Tandon says. Does that mean flash-sale sites like Gilt.com? Tandon says that would be great. Mainstream retailers like J.Crew? It could happen, he says.”